Aristotle's definitions

For Aristotle, definition was a matter of uniqueness and essentiality. To summarize: Aristotle uses the neuter substantive ἴδιον to mean a description which may be predicated of one species (εἶδος) or individual, and not of any other species or individual. ‘Two-legged animal capable of laughter’ is thus an ἴδιον of ‘human being’, while ‘two-legged animal sitting in seat 43 of the lower reading room of the Bodleian library’ is an ἴδιον of me at the moment of this writing.Footnote ⁸ Strictly speaking, an ἴδιον is a definition (ὅρος) if it describes an essential feature which invariably belongs to its subject by the nature of that subject (καθ’ αὑτὸ καὶ ἀεί), not only in a particular moment or in relation to particular other things (πρὸς ἕτερον καὶ ποτέ).Footnote ⁹ In these terms, the two examples I gave above are ἴδια of ‘human being’ and of me respectively, but neither is a ὅρος. ‘Mortal animal capable of reason’, though, is a ὅρος: a description of ‘what it is to be’ (τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι) a human.Footnote ¹⁰ Aristotle maintains this distinction throughout his work on logic by using ἴδιον in what has been called its ‘weak’ sense—to mean a unique property which may be, but is not necessarily, essential to and therefore definitive of the thing it describes.Footnote ¹¹

In other contexts, Aristotle also talks about unique individuals in terms of a ὑποκείμενον, an underlying ‘stuff’ or ‘matter’, of which various properties may come to be predicated. It is a vexed question whether Aristotle thought that there exists, actually or conceivably, some unqualified ‘prime matter’ (πρώτη ὕλη) which can take on any characteristic and out of whose various individuations every known thing is formed.Footnote ¹² All we need say here, however, is that Aristotle describes the things we encounter around us as being composed of some underlying substance which, though in itself unqualified in some respect, can come to be qualified in that same respect.Footnote ¹³ By way of illustration we are invited to imagine shapeless bronze, which may be shaped first into a square, then into a circle. The sculptor would thereby have made two different things, but the bronze ‘subsists’ (ὑπόκειται) or ‘endures’ (ὑπομένει). The plastic arts are a natural point of reference for this mode of thought, and the ὑποκείμενον may be referred to somewhat figuratively as ὕλη—the ‘wood’ or ‘material’ out of which an individual is ‘carved’ to take on the properties which make it unlike other things.

A third important way in which Aristotle characterizes individuals is via the notorious ἔργον. This word is very often understood to mean the action which some thing performs qua that thing. However, a recent interpretation argues that the term also denotes the product of that essential work.Footnote ¹⁴ Whether or not we can accept this assertion for Aristotle generally, it will soon appear to hold good in terms of his poetic theory. In any case, the ἔργον of a thing must be unique (ἴδιον) to it, and is closely wrapped up with its definition: when we know what x does that no other kind of thing or person does, then we are able to know x qua x, and to evaluate it in the terms proper to its unique nature.Footnote ¹⁵

The concepts of ἴδιον, ὑποκείμενον and ἔργον provide three different but interrelated means of specifying what something is: they represent distinct systems of thought which may nevertheless describe the same subject in complementary ways. To give an example of all these terms in action: if a man knows no music but then receives training to become an aulete, we may say that that ‘man’ was the ὑποκείμενον which underwent the change from ‘unmusical’ to ‘musical’. Now our man might be said to have acquired the ἴδιον (‘mortal animal trained in music’), and to be able to accomplish the unique ἔργον (aulos-playing), which makes him an aulete. The thing which results from that action, a performed piece of aulos-music, might also be called the aulete's ἔργον.Footnote ¹⁶

Aristotle's definition of poetry

Aristotle's application of his definitional terminology to literary criticism is sparse but suggestive. In the Poetics he usually uses ἴδιον to designate a unique property, not of the τέχνη ποιητική itself but of a particular genre or subgenre thereof.Footnote ¹⁷ However, Aristotle writes at Poet. 1456a34–6 that the discussion of διάνοια is something more properly ἴδιον to the study of rhetoric than to that of poetry—this suggests he thought that ποιητική had a definite identity characterized by unique features. There is even a tantalizing but inconclusively lacunose mention of an ἴδιον ποιητοῦ in what may perhaps be a fragment of Aristotle's On Poets.Footnote ¹⁸ We know that Aristotle at least thought that auletes had a unique ἔργον on the basis of whose accomplishment they were to be evaluated—he says so at Eth. Nic. 1097b25–8. It is thus not surprising that in the Poetics he formulates something like an ἔργον for poets in general, and uses it to define them and their craft: famously, making a μίμησις in one or a combination of ἁρμονία, λόγος and ῥυθμός is the action that all kinds of poets perform (Poet. 1447a21–3). We might call this an ἴδιον ἔργον in both senses of the latter word: making a μίμησις in the relevant media is what all poets and only poets do, and the product of that action is the particular kind of μίμησις which qualifies as a poem. Not performing that action means that a person is not making poetry, even if his work shares other features, such as metre, with many things which are poems.Footnote ¹⁹ Like all characterizations based on the ἔργον, this description of poets and poems is aspectual: it enables us to consider poets’ work solely in its capacity as poetry and eschew from our assessment other things which the same work may simultaneously be.Footnote ²⁰ Hence a poem may fail qua scientifically accurate description, but succeed qua mimetically compelling depiction, that is, qua poem.Footnote ²¹

A consequence of this is that, for Aristotle, poets and the poems they create are defined according to a single concept of composition which includes both music and language: an instrumentalist, a Homeric rhapsode and a lyric soloist all perform poetic μίμησις and thus all accomplish what is essentially one and the same act. This act brings about a particular kind of change which may be described metaphorically in material terms: Aristotle, like many others, often refers to the events and emotions which poets or rhetoricians convey as ὑποκείμενα, the ‘underlying matter’ which, though itself not essentially poetic or rhetorical, can be given qualities which make it so by the right kind of artist.Footnote ²² On this model, though the story of Oedipus is presented by both Ps.-Apollodorus and Sophocles, only Sophocles presents it mimetically in the media required for it to qualify as ποιητική. What poets are fundamentally doing, then, is giving to narrative events (πράξεις) the particular expressive format which makes them into a poetic μίμησις.Footnote ²³ This may entail suggesting narrative or conveying emotion via purely instrumental music, as in the expressive sound-effects of the Pythian nomos.Footnote ²⁴ It may entail communicating a story in ‘bare’ (ψιλοί) words without instrumental melody, as in a spoken recitation of Homer. It may entail depicting a series of events and actions using rhythmic language sung to instrumental accompaniment, as in a tragic choral ode. But whatever collection of features may be present or absent in an individual work, the τέχνη ποιητική remains essentially an art of tone, rhythm and language.

Definition in Stoicism

According to Alexander of Aphrodisias, Stoics such as Chrysippus broadly agreed with Aristotle that the requirements of definition were satisfied by ἡ τοῦ ἰδίου ἀπόδοσις, the furnishing of the ἴδιον.Footnote ²⁵ Chrysippus may have meant ἴδιον to include the notion of essence, in which case his account was the same as Aristotle's: definitions are unique and essential descriptions of the thing defined. But it is possible that Chrysippus did not believe in essences and therefore used ἴδιον here to mean simply any unique set of characteristics.Footnote ²⁶ On either reading what remains consistent is the stipulation of uniqueness—the requirement that definitions predicate of their subject some property which only that subject possesses.

The Stoics also had their own concept of a ὑποκείμενον or ἄποιος ὕλη, some unformed matter which could be shaped into various types of individual by the acquisition of qualities. Whereas in Aristotle this idea of ‘moulding’ or ‘shaping’ is best understood as an illustrative metaphor, among the Stoics it was a literal tenet of physics.Footnote ²⁷ In the universe imagined by the Stoa there did exist a corporeal prime matter—an undivided and continuous σῶμα which could be moulded like putty or clay.Footnote ²⁸ Dexippus details how a section of the general ὑποκείμενον can be altered so as to become ποιόν, qualified in a certain way such as ‘fragrant’ or ‘square’. This newly qualified entity can then itself become a second kind of ὑποκείμενον: if, for example, the general ὑποκείμενον were so qualified as to become white, the resulting white entity would then be considered a secondary ὑποκείμενον, to be moulded more precisely into, say, a white oblong. When the matter of a ὑποκείμενον is arranged in a way unlike that of any other, it becomes ἰδίως ποιόν—a uniquely qualified entity such as Socrates or Westminster Abbey.Footnote ²⁹ Since nearly everything, including the mind and the soul, is corporeal in Stoicism, this progressively individuated moulding of physical ‘stuff’ is all that is needed to shape a complete being with all of the characteristics that individuate it from other beings.Footnote ³⁰

Stoic definitions of poetry

This material terminology is not explicitly used in the Stoic definitions of poetic art which come down to us through Posidonius and Varro. But we may fruitfully interpret those definitions in light of the theories just described. Both writers gesture back towards a distinction invoked by Neoptolemus of Parium (and probably others before him) between ποίημα (or πόημα) and ποίησις (or πόησις).Footnote ³¹ Neoptolemus, a Peripatetic with demonstrably Aristotelian sensibilities, used these as aspectual distinctions—for him they were different ways of looking at the same piece of linguistic material.Footnote ³² Neoptolemus, says Philodemus, undertook ‘to distinguish (χωρίζειν) the cognitive content (διανοήματα) from the diction (λέξις)’ so that ‘only subject matter (ὑπόθεσις) belongs to πόησις’ whereas ‘only the arrangement of the diction (σύνθεσις λέξεως) is involved in πόημα’.Footnote ³³

Posidonius, for his part, defines ποίημα as any ‘diction with metre or rhythm (λέξις ἔμμετρος ἢ ἔνρυθμος)’, whereas ποίησις is specifically ‘ποίημα which signifies (σημαντικὸν ποίημα), comprising a μίμησις of mortal and godly things’.Footnote ³⁴ Tellingly, the example that Posidonius gives of ποίημα which fails to attain the status of ποίησις is Euripides’ Γαῖα μεγίστη καὶ Διὸς Αἰθήρ (Eur. fr. 839.1 Kannicht). This instance of λέξις actually is σημαντική according to the principles of the Stoic Tέχνη Περὶ Φωνῆς, to which Posidonius’ definition was probably a later contribution. That is, the fragment has a comprehensible semantic referent and is not a meaningless concatenation of letters such as βλίτυρι.Footnote ³⁵ Therefore, Posidonius seems to be articulating two features, both of which rhythmic or metrical λέξις must have to qualify as ποίησις.Footnote ³⁶ Such λέξις must both 1) be semantically meaningful and 2) use its semantic meaning to deliver an artistic representation, probably in narrative form. The Euripides fragment satisfies one of these requirements but not the other: while it denotes the Εarth and the Εther, it does not describe or depict them in action.

In Varro it is even clearer that poema may be semantically meaningful without qualifying as poesis: this is the status afforded to a distichon epigrammation, a two-line epigram, in his scheme. Poesis must not only have semantic meaning but also convey a perpetuum argumentum, as do the Iliad and the Annales.Footnote ³⁷ Hellenistic concerns about length and brevity may have been at stake here so that poesis for Varro had to be not only meaningful and narrative but also relatively long.Footnote ³⁸ However, the fundamental issue is most likely not length qua length but narrative completeness of the kind which in Aristotle necessitates that poems be neither too large nor too small to be contemplated as a mimetic whole.Footnote ³⁹

What is clear in both Stoic definitions is that the underlying thing which may be so qualified as to count as ποίημα or ποίησις is verbal language (λέξις). This too may come from Neoptolemus, who argued that ποήματα, words considered purely as formal arrangements of phonemes, ‘are primary among the εἴδη ([π]ρωτεύ[ει]ν τ[ῶν] εἰδῶ[ν])’.Footnote ⁴⁰ That is Aristotelian language, though it is unclear to us, as it was to Philodemus, what it means for an εἶδος or ‘part’ of poetry ‘to be primary’.Footnote ⁴¹ But we might suggest a comparison here with the πρώτη ὕλη: perhaps metrical λέξις is poetry's ‘primary matter’, the basic substance capable of acquiring poetic properties. For ποήματα to πρωτεύειν among the aspects of poetic composition would then mean that formalized λέξις is the first underlying matter of which other qualifiers such as ‘mimetic’ or ‘meaningful’ may or may not come to be predicated.Footnote ⁴² This could have led Neoptolemus to the view that the formal arrangement of language was the first activity to which a poet ought to devote his attention,Footnote ⁴³ after the accomplishment or mastery of which he may turn to investing that language with a plot or subject matter.Footnote ⁴⁴

Certainly this two-tiered system of progressive qualification helps make good sense out of our Stoic definitions. We can understand those definitions better if we speculate that, for Posidonius and Varro, λέξις is a ὑποκείμενον which becomes ποιόν as ποίημα when arranged in a metrical or rhythmic format (contra Aristotle).Footnote ⁴⁵ That ποίημα may then itself act as a ὑποκείμενον and become more specifically ποιόν when its words are so arranged as to semantically present a narrative or depiction. This model is appropriate in the system of linguistic atomism which underlies the Tέχνη Περὶ Φωνῆς. For Stoics such as Chrysippus and Diogenes of Babylon, speech is a material thing made out of physical building-blocks—the sonic airstreams of uttered letters are irreducible elements, στοιχεῖα, which are then arranged into the progressively complex structures of syllables, words, clauses and sentences.Footnote ⁴⁶ The idea which is thereby communicated, the λεκτόν or ‘sayable’, is one of the few incorporeal things in Stoic theory.Footnote ⁴⁷ But it too arises—the details of how are not specified—out of physical στοιχεῖα when they are arranged in a particular way so as to communicate meaning.Footnote ⁴⁸ Similarly in Posidonius and Varro, metre or rhythm can be conceived of literally as the shape given to words, the form into which the ὑποκείμενον of linguistic sound is arranged to become ποιόν as ποίημα. The resultant ποίημα can then act as a secondary ὑποκείμενον to be shaped again so that meaningful μίμησις emerges out of it—that is, so that it becomes ποίησις.

We may note also that Posidonius is careful to use two terms—ἔμμετρος and ἔνρυθμος—making it very likely that he means to discuss both musical and non-musical linguistic art.Footnote ⁴⁹ So, like Aristotle, Posidonius thinks that poetry may involve both unaccompanied words and sung poems. At the same time the nonverbal aspects of the art have become inessential in Posidonius in a way in which they are not in Aristotle. For Aristotle it was plot and action, whether conveyed wordlessly or verbally, that constituted the essential material to be worked into a poetic format. For Posidonius the indispensable material of poetry is λέξις, and the formal elements which qualify something as ποίημα are qualities which attach specifically to words, whether those qualities include sung rhythm or spoken metre. ποίησις, moreover, does not only have to accomplish μίμησις: it must specifically do so semantically, as meaningful language. Therefore, musical melody and rhythm, which could stand alone as ποιητική for Aristotle, are for Posidonius optional additions to the words and meanings which properly constitute poetic art.

Andromenides and the ἔργον

Both Stoic and Peripatetic modes of definition were brought to bear on poetry by a group of scholars known to modernity as the Euphonists. These critics’ views are reported only in the nightmarishly mangled papyri containing Philodemus of Gadara's survey Περὶ Ποιημάτων. I use the Greek title to highlight something these Euphonists have in common, namely their exclusive focus on the formal elements of verbal composition (ποίημα). Specifically they often reduced poetry to σύνθεσις λέξεως, which for them meant the arrangement of letters, words, clauses and sentences to produce aurally pleasing combinations.Footnote ⁵⁰ The Euphonists’ attempts to isolate σύνθεσις as poetry's sole important feature were motivated by an impulse to articulate ever more precisely the definition of poetic art using the conceptual tools of the ἴδιον and the ἔργον. Philodemus’ On Poems lets us observe how the Euphonists employed this definitional terminology to distinguish poetry not only from music but also from all other uses of language.

Philodemus’ review seems to proceed in chronological order, and the first critic whose ideas emerge with real clarity from the extant fragments is Andromenides.Footnote ⁵¹ Most modern scholars believe that he was a Peripatetic who flourished around the turn of the third century b.c.Footnote ⁵² One reason for agreeing with this assessment is the fact that Andromenides appeals to a number of Aristotelian concepts, including the ἔργον.Footnote ⁵³ He writes that ‘the task of poets (ποητῶν ἔργον) is not to say what no one else has, but to say it in a way in which no one else would express himself’.Footnote ⁵⁴ Elsewhere, he specifies that ‘the work (ἔργον) will be accomplished if, among the [words] used about [sc. the subject at hand], the poet picks the more beautiful and stays away from the uglier ones’.Footnote ⁵⁵ Andromenides is describing the kind of action that all poets and only poets perform, and the unique kind of work they produce thereby. Thus a poet is a poet in so far as he can ‘choose words akin to the content so that they fit harmoniously’ and attain ‘similarity in the diction to the content depicted’.Footnote ⁵⁶ Andromenides shares this insistence upon appropriateness (τὸ πρέπον or οἰκειότης) of word-choice (ἐκλογή) with many ancient rhetorical theorists.Footnote ⁵⁷ However, unlike his predecessors, Andromenides excludes everything besides aurally felicitous ἐκλογή from his definition of the art. A poet qua poet does not make arguments or choose his content: if he does do these things, he does them in some other capacity, such as qua dialectician.Footnote ⁵⁸ By contrast, the poetic act (ἔργον) just is the selection of the most beautiful words from among the appropriate ones, and a work (ἔργον) of poetry is a composition whose words have been chosen to exhibit beauty.

What makes a word beautiful for Andromenides? Theophrastus thought that words possess beauty if the sound of them pleases the hearing (ἀκοή), if they convey imagery that appeals to the sight (ὄψις), or if they express a concept that is ‘dignified to the mind’ (τῇ διανοίᾳ ἔντιμον).Footnote ⁵⁹ For Andromenides, though, the poet by definition seeks the first kind of beautiful word, the kind that delights by means of the real or imagined impact of its phonetic structure on our hearing.Footnote ⁶⁰ ‘A word contributes beauty' to a poem, he writes, ‘whenever the syllables shine, densely woven with letters. The mouth grabs onto weighty syllables of the most incandescent tones and tosses them forth.’Footnote ⁶¹ The whole project of what is now called Euphonism—the project of defining and evaluating poetry purely on the basis of its phonetic makeup—begins with these first steps. Andromenides’ contribution is in essence a definitional distinction between the poetic ἔργον and all other acts: poets are poets only insofar as they please the ear with well-chosen words.

Heracleodorus, Pausimachus, and the ἴδιον

Euphonism comes into its own when later theorists, notably Heracleodorus and Pausimachus, further circumscribe the concept of poetry using the notion of an ἴδιον. Taken as a whole, the work of these two thinkers represents a developing effort to isolate verbal sound as the sole feature which characterizes and defines poetry qua poetry.Footnote ⁶² This argument is first formulated in terms of a bipartite scheme of lexical σύνθεσις and the euphony which results from it. The poet's unique feature is that he arranges words in such an order that they sound lovely; when he does so, his work will possess the specific kind of lovely sound that makes it a poem.Footnote ⁶³ Thus we read, in a passage attributed to Heracleodorus, that ‘the poet aims for the ἴδιον in σύνθεσις’ and that ‘the σύνθεσις is something ἴδιον to the poet’.Footnote ⁶⁴ When the poet achieves good σύνθεσις, his words exhibit εὐφωνία, which is the ἴδιον of poetry: ‘the εὐφωνία which supervenes’ upon his verbal arrangements ‘is the ἴδιον’.Footnote ⁶⁵ This is ‘supervenience’ (ἐπιγίγνεσθαι) in the sense also used by the Stoics: good σύνθεσις is a sufficient, but not a necessary, condition for the emergence of euphonious verbal sound.Footnote ⁶⁶ Consequently, there is an attempt in later Euphonism, currently attributed to Pausimachus, to locate the ἴδιον of poetry in verbal euphony of any kind, whether produced by σύνθεσις or arising from some other source such as the inherent beauty of certain letters.Footnote ⁶⁷ On this model even parrots, if they repeat euphonious language, are said to produce poetry, though they do not themselves choose, arrange or understand the words.Footnote ⁶⁸ These progressive moves towards a singular ἴδιον of poetry aim to define the art as nothing more or less than lexical sound which strikes a listener as beautiful.Footnote ⁶⁹

James Porter has pointed out that these attempts by Euphonists to isolate the essential nature of poems are not only reminiscent of Aristotle but even result in some conclusions about poetic art which are akin to Aristotle's.Footnote ⁷⁰ Like Aristotle, the Euphonists use their precise definition of the art to identify things like metre, which, though commonly considered essential to poetry, are in fact not part of poetry's ἴδιον.Footnote ⁷¹ The Euphonists also agree with Aristotle that an artist is only deficient qua poet if he fails in his uniquely poetic task—errors of any other kind are excusable ‘if the poet does not fall short as regards his particular excellence (ἴδιον ἀγαθόν)’.Footnote ⁷² But the Euphonists’ idea of what makes a poem is of course much narrower than Aristotle's, and consequently they exclude from their definitions all sorts of concerns which Aristotle considered central to poetic composition. Perhaps most importantly, in Euphonism proper the communication of content has nothing to do with poetic composition, and a poet qua poet is not someone who pays any attention to the meaning of words. In fact, composing meaningless gibberish is one of the things a poet can do without failing in terms of the ἴδιον ἀγαθόν.Footnote ⁷³

This exclusion of semantic meaning from the act of poetic composition also puts the Euphonists at odds with Posidonius. But in other ways Heracleodorus’ and Pausimachus’ poetic definitions show signs of cross-pollination with the Stoa.Footnote ⁷⁴ One point of contact is Pausimachus’ atomistic analysis of language which, like the Tέχνη Περὶ Φωνῆς, treats verbal utterances as material constructions made from irreducibly small στοιχεῖα.Footnote ⁷⁵ I have argued already that linguistic physicalism is what leads Posidonius and Varro to imagine poets materially moulding verbal elements into poetic structures. In Euphonism, this sculptural model for poetic composition is quite explicit: Heracleodorus says that poets apply their unique genius (ἴδιος νοῦς) to ‘unpoetic subject matter’ (ἀπόητος ὑπόθεσις), just as those who sculpt by hand may use material (ὕλη) which other kinds of plastic artists use.Footnote ⁷⁶ One is first reminded that Aristotle already employed the language of ὑποκείμενα as a metaphor for ‘subject matter’ which could be shaped into a particular kind of literary composition. But just as the Stoic philosophy of material change literalizes sculptural language that is only figurative in Aristotle, so the Euphonists take literally a metaphor from earlier criticism: poets really are in the business of sculpting verses, arranging words next to one another so that they will sound beautiful and thus poetic.Footnote ⁷⁷ We might even hear echoes, in this physical moulding practised upon a commonly available ‘unpoetic subject-matter’ (ἀπόητος ὑπόθεσις), of the sculptural formation of qualified individuals out of a general ‘unqualified matter’ (ἄποιος ὕλη) in Stoic physics.

But whereas Posidonius thought that poets moulded words first into metrical arrangements, and then into semantically meaningful ones, in Euphonism the only kind of arrangement that matters poetically is euphonious arrangement. This difference can be understood using the terminology of material change: in Stoicism, lexical elements constitute the ὑποκείμενον, itself not inherently poetic or unpoetic, which is shaped first into metre, then into semantic μίμησις so as to become poetry. In Euphonism, by contrast, the poetically neutral ὑποκείμενον is narratives and characters, and the poet's task is to arrange the language which describes that content so that it may achieve the poetic ἴδιον of beautiful sound. Both of these formulations turn upon relations of emergence. For Stoics, the meaning of an utterance is an immaterial thing which emerges when sound is materially arranged in a certain way. In Euphonism, poetic euphony emerges from language which is materially shaped by the poet's σύνθεσις.Footnote ⁷⁸ In some senses, then, the Euphonist idea of poetry is an alternative version of the Stoic one, in which semantic μίμησις is replaced by beautiful sound as the defining feature which emerges out of the particular kind of verbal arrangement that constitutes the poetic act.

Where Euphonism is in complete agreement with Stoicism is in the view of poetry as fundamentally verbal: it is specifically the sound of well-arranged λέξις that makes something a poem for the Euphonists. At the same time Euphonists do tend to describe verbal sound with musical language. Andromenides refers to the φθόγγοι exhibited by syllables, and a later Euphonist compares beautiful pitch-accentuation to the proper relaxation of tension (ἄνεσις) in an instrument (ὄργανον), which achieves attunement (ἁρμογή).Footnote ⁷⁹ This is because the Euphonists share with the Aristoxenean musicological tradition a belief that all poetic language, melodic progression and rhythmic structure are essentially series of arranged sounds experienced by a listener in real time. All such sound—whether melodic or syllabic—can be fittingly evaluated and described using one set of aural terms.Footnote ⁸⁰ But the Euphonists still aim to isolate as uniquely poetic the kinds of sound which attach to words, and to analyse those sounds on their own merits without reference to musical concerns. Thus the ῥυθμικὴ θεωρία discussed at Phld. Po. 1.ci.2–civ.10 turns out to be a study of linguistic metre, not of musical rhythm. And discussions of pitch are limited to verbal accent without reference to musical melody—even when the artists under scrutiny are musicians like Timotheus, for whom the two are very likely to have diverged from one another.Footnote ⁸¹ A fundamental premise of Euphonism is that all music and poetry just is sound as heard by an audience. But in the context of this auditory phenomenalism, the Euphonists take great pains to isolate poetic (verbal) sound from all other sounds, including those of music. This too is a project which shares much with that of Aristoxenus, to whose definitional efforts we will now turn.

The birth of musicology

Aristoxenus of Tarentum claimed to be Greece's first true harmonic scientist precisely because no thinker before him had defined just what is and what is not musical ἁρμονία. In his view no one failed more entirely in this regard than the ἁρμονικοί, who were guilty of including in their conception of the science such irrelevancies as notation and the structure of instruments.Footnote ⁸² In general, Aristoxenus did not look favourably upon anyone whose theoretical axioms were not fully abstracted from the contingent exigencies of live performance.Footnote ⁸³ He attempted to distinguish himself from such amateurs by defining the essential nature of harmonics in terms that scholars have long recognized as Aristotelian.Footnote ⁸⁴ We have now seen several ways in which Peripatetic definitional science influenced efforts to distinguish poetic language from musical sound. With Aristoxenus we can see how Aristotelian principles also inspired a complementary attempt to distinguish musical sound from poetic language.

To qualify as a free-standing science in Aristotelian terms, harmonics would have to begin from sources, ἀρχαί, which are wholly present to our senses and from which we can reason to discover axioms that are distinct from those governing other sciences.Footnote ⁸⁵ Thus Aristoxenus was keen to rebut the Pythagorean idea, which Aristotle accepted, that harmonic consonance is simply a consequence of numerical relationships and therefore properly the object not of its own unique branch of science but of mathematical analysis.Footnote ⁸⁶ If when I hear a fifth all I am actually hearing is the sound generated by the ratio of 3:2, then I can account for my experience via mathematical axioms which are also used to account for, say, the structural integrity of a building. Aristoxenus’ rebuttal of this line of reasoning is that, although musical ratios may explain why certain strings or lengths of pipe produce consonant tones, they actually tell us nothing about the qualitative experience of hearing those tones. That experience is a perception unto itself, a recognition of tonal relationship ‘according to the way in which it appears to our senses’.Footnote ⁸⁷ This phenomenalism allowed Aristoxenus to find in the listener's perceptual experience of harmonious notes the ἀρχαί for a unique science.

So Aristoxenus lights upon a precise definition of musical ἁρμονία, which for him is the relationship between tones as perceived by a trained listener. That definition is not framed in terms of the ἴδιον, but it is nevertheless manifestly concerned with Aristotelian notions of unique essence. Aristoxenus primarily wants to distinguish harmonics from mathematics, but in doing so he also, as he takes care to emphasize, distinguishes musical ἁρμονία from an array of other things with which it was conflated by his misguided predecessors. To begin with, ἁρμονία of the kind Aristoxenus studies is different from the many other kinds of order, such as political cooperation or psychological alignment, which may also be described as ἁρμονία—as Aristides Quintilianus (1.13.1–5) would later put it, the qualities under discussion are those which may be ascribed ‘uniquely to sound’ (ἰδίως ἐπὶ φωνῆς).Footnote ⁸⁸ Moreover, the study of musical ἁρμονία describes tonal sound only, and has nothing to say about ethical concerns which might dictate the correct relationships between that sound and the λέξις it often accompanies.Footnote ⁸⁹ Thus, as we shall now see, Aristoxenus wants to restrict himself in the Harmonics to tonal issues as abstracted from lexical ones, even while maintaining a notion that ἁρμονία and λέξις may be united in a single poetic act.

Putting it together: music and words in Aristoxenus

λέξις for Aristoxenus is definitely not ἁρμονία, but neither is it wholly outside of the study of music, broadly conceived. This issue is complicated by the fact that Aristoxenus seems to have reformulated his views on the subject in the process of revision between what is now our Book 1 and Book 2 of the Harm.Footnote ⁹⁰ Nevertheless, Aristoxenus articulates in both books a notion that some things lie outside of the harmonic art but are still to be considered ‘when composition (ποιητική) makes use of intervals and tones’. Such considerations are extraneous to the science of harmonics, but they are ‘the purview of the musical man (τοῦ μουσικοῦ)’.Footnote ⁹¹ Even when Aristoxenus widens the scope of his treatise to include the stringing together of notes in a melody (μελοποιία), there remain some things which, though not relevant to the Harmonics, are included among the parts of μουσική which figure into ποιητική. The question is whether lexical composition is one such part.

I translate ποιητική with Barker as ‘composition’, rather than with Macran as ‘poetry’, in order to avoid begging the question of whether Aristoxenus thinks that verbal language figures into the definition of μουσική.Footnote ⁹² But I want to argue that lexical arrangement was indeed part of the musical art in Aristoxenus’ view. For one thing, in Book 2 Aristoxenus lists as parts of the overarching musical science ἥ τε ῥυθμικὴ καὶ ἡ μετρική, suggesting that syllabic metre is just as much a part of the discipline as musical rhythm.Footnote ⁹³ Moreover, when Ps.-Plutarch has Soterichus invoke Aristoxenean thought on the subject ([De mus. 1143F3–1144E9), there emerges this telling pronouncement:

Soterichus says further that someone who is only educated in harmonics (a ἁρμονικός) will be limited in his full appreciation of music. This is because each composition (τῶν ποιημάτων ἕκαστον) is a complete whole (τέλειον) to be evaluated not only on the reductive basis of its correct harmonic composition but also on its combination of harmonic, rhythmic and syllabic structure to convey some depiction or referent. By judging not only the internal correctness of these three types of arrangement but also their use alongside one another, we are able to properly evaluate their collective depiction ‘of those emotional states communicated by the art of composition in works of composition (τῶν παθῶν τῶν ὑπὸ τῆς ποιητικῆς σημαινομένων ἐν τοῖς ποιήμασιν)’.

What we can see from this rich passage is that Aristoxenus, at least as interpreted by Ps.-Plutarch, held a broad view of μουσική as involving lexical, rhythmic and harmonic sound. These three types of sound are present to the senses as a unity, but separated from one another aspectually by the mind and described according to the principles of their respective sciences.Footnote ⁹⁵ All three of these sciences were probably governed by their own principles of atomistic σύνθεσις: we read in the Harm. (1.27.16–34) that ‘there appears to be a nature governing continuity in melody similar to the one in diction (λέξις) which governs the arrangement (σύνθεσις) of letters’.Footnote ⁹⁶ Rhythm too is described as a series of progressively complex arrangements out of the elemental unit or ‘primary time’ (πρῶτος χρόνος).Footnote ⁹⁷

In each realm of study, then, correctness is to be judged on principles of combination specific to the particular στοιχεῖα which are to be synthetically arranged and combined: letters into syllables and words, notes into intervals and melodies, beats into cola and periods. Aristoxenus is very clear that the synthetic system governing the arrangement of syllables is distinct (κεχώρισται) from that of pitch. Each, in fact, has its own ‘unique quality’—its own ἰδιότης according to which it is to be evaluated.Footnote ⁹⁸ But the respective συνθέσεις of syllable, note and beat are also analogous to one another, and the correct use of all three together results in a unified act of artistic expression that communicates a single σημαινόμενον, something represented or signified. It is this holistic accomplishment which is, in Soterichus’ words, the ‘work (ἔργον) of the artist’, and evaluation of it constitutes full appreciation of μουσική.Footnote ⁹⁹ Thus Aristoxenus retained Aristotle's broad definition of poets as those who compose depictions in the media of melody, rhythm and language. But within that definition he also worked to carve out aspectually distinct natures and governing principles of composition for each of the three individual media.